inspo/interiority
Sally Rooney,
Don DeLillo,
Frank Conroy,
David Foster Wallace,
Ursula K. Le Guin,
Jonathan Franzen,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Mary Karr,
Rachel Kushner
not descriptions of the physical world but of whatever is going on in the writer's mind
There are moments when the mask slips, when his failure to truly engage with the humanity of the victims and survivors shines through. He often appeals to a ‘we’ that is all too clearly a cypher for his own responses to the event. “All over Britain, the sight of the burning tower gave people a horrible sense of dread followed by a sense of relief,” he writes, as though it is a matter of public record, a fact as indisputable as the number of 999 calls, or the square-meterage of the building. This slippage reveals the power of O’Hagan’s rhetoric. In an article that purports to be a dispassionate, objective account of events, a speculative statement that is predicated entirely on the (clearly ridiculous) notion that Andrew O’Hagan has unlimited access to the interior worlds of “people all over Britain” passes by almost unnoticed. [...] Reading the piece, I almost fell for it; I doubted myself, I questioned myself, I looked back over last year’s writings to try and re-attune to the person I was back then. And I’m as certain as I can be that Grenfell did not make me feel “alive” or “exhilarated”. It made me feel sad, and angry, and powerless. It made me mourn for days. The summer grew dark. I felt the fear and the sadness in my bones. “No man is an island,” as the poem goes—except, perhaps, for Andrew O’Hagan.
My son tells me you're ignoring his phone calls, Lorraine added.
Marianne paused, and the silence in the kitchen was loud in her ears, like the white noise of rushing water. Yes, she said. I am, I suppose.
Good for you, said Lorraine. He doesn't deserve you.
Marianne felt a relief so high and sudden that it was almost like panic. She put the orange juice on the counter and closed the fridge.
[...] Lately Marianne walks around Carricklea and thinks how beautiful it is in sunny weather, white clouds like chalk dust over the library, long avenues lined with trees. The arc of a tennis ball through blue air. Cars slowing at traffic lights with their windows rolled down, music bleating from the speakers. Marianne wonders what it would be like to belong here, to walk down the street greeting people and smiling. To feel that life was happening here, and not somewhere else far away.
[...] He only had sex with her twice, neither time enjoyable, and when they lay in bed together he felt a constricting pain in his chest and throat that made it difficult to breathe. He had thought that being with her would make him feel less lonely, but it only gave his loneliness a new stubborn quality, like it was planted down inside him and impossible to kill.
His eyes were hurting and he closed them. He couldn't understand how this had happened, how he had let the discussion slip away like this. It was too late to say he wanted to stay with her, that was clear, but when had it become too late? It seemed to have happened immediately. He contemplated putting his face down on the table and just crying like a child. Instead he opened his eyes again.
when he means to ask her if he can stay with her over the summer but it gets away from him
Marianne leans the whole weight of her body against the door, her hands firmly grasping the handle, eyes screwed shut. From a young age her life has been abnormal, she knows that. But so much is covered over in time now, the way leaves fall and cover a piece of earth, and eventually mingle with the soil. Things that happened to her then are buried in the earth of her body. [...]
I don’t want a baby, Florence. I want to sit here and read. I want to go out for a drink. I want to listen to my hi-fi. I want to take the night train. I want to work as late as I want and spend my pay cheque on a sharkskin suit. I want to fuck you on the beach and take you to Australia, throw massive dinner parties and even do the dishes myself. I want to lie on the floor with the cats and listen to you play the piano and keep out of the way as your patients come through the door, I want to go to the theatre and the movies and out for lunch, and laugh at your jokes and your politics, and love you all the time. And you want to break all that, and you’re not even giving me a choice in the matter, and you’re pretending everything is fine. You say you want to build a new world but you just want to destroy the old one.
Sonora Review DFW Tribute
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Sonora Review DFW Tribute
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Sonora Review DFW Tribute
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Sophie, in bed, drowsed, and bits of memory came at her in the flashing strobes of predreams. Here's a shiny ice storm, two newlyweds in a new tract house in Cicero. Ice glittering gray in a crunchy March lawn, more wet ice falling out of a sky without color. Solomon watching it out a window, Sophie behind him with her arms around his thick waist, her hair a black waterfall down his arm, her chin on his shoulder, also watching. Pellets of dirty Cicero crystal hitting the hard lawn, beads bouncing and jumping hopping lively skittering ice. Solomon's voice, quiet, full of Silverfish dreams, his breath fogs a rainbow circle on the window as he stares at the jumping beads, whispers to himself grasshoppers grasshoppers grasshoppers. A young man she loves dreams life into ice while she plays with his ear.
just, beautiful
On the morning following his arrival, I did everything I could to get out of the house for my morning hike without his knowing where I had gone. Breakfastless, with hysterical haste, I gathered my net, pill boxes, killing jar, and escaped through the window. Once in the forest, I was safe; but still I walked on, my calves quaking, my eyes full of scalding tears, the whole of me twitching with shame and self-disgust, as I visualized my poor friend, with his long pale face and black tie, moping in the hot garden—patting the panting dogs for want of something better to do, and trying hard to justify my absence to himself.
amazing
In my foolish innocence, I believed that what I had written was a beautiful and wonderful thing. As I carried it homeward, still unwritten, but so complete that even its punctuation marks were impressed on my brain like a pillow crease on a sleeper’s flesh, I did not doubt that my mother would greet my achievement with glad tears of pride. The possibility of her being much too engrossed, that particular night, in other events to listen to verse did not enter my mind at all. Never in my life had I craved more for her praise. Never had I been more vulnerable. My nerves were on edge because of the darkness of the earth, which I had not noticed muffling itself up, and the nakedness of the firmament, the disrobing of which I had not noticed either. Overhead, between the formless trees bordering my dissolving path, the night sky was pale with stars. In those years, that marvelous mess of constellations, nebulae, interstellar gaps and all the rest of the awesome show provoked in me an indescribable sense of nausea, of utter panic, as if I were hanging from earth upside down on the brink of infinite space, with terrestrial gravity still holding me by the heels but about to release me any moment.